Category Archives: Photography

Miao Jia Xin is a Chinese photographer based in New York City. Miao Jia Xin was born in Shanghai. Several years ago he moved to the United States and devoted himself entirely to art. He accepts camera as a tool that documents his art. So in fact it doesn’t matter if the quality of photography is low. Sometimes he even is interested in poor quality of the pictures he takes. So he is absolutely okay with it. Everything depends on his purposes and circumstances. He tries to use all the opportunities he has at the moment.

A term “photogenicy” firstly appeared in the sphere of cinema. That meant to describe a person who looked much more attractive on a screen rather than in the real life. Beauty, regular facial features, good complexion and expressive eyes are the important factors for being photogenic, though they are not the crucial ones.

A photo is the reproduction of life moments on a surface with slightly alternated brightness and colors. The picture doesn’t possess smells, sounds and context of the life event. The human brain can perceive the images objectively only in cases when they are surrounded by their context. That’s why a person who is considered to be a not very pleasant one in reality may look amazing on his family pictures. We evaluate the image of a person on the whole in an objective reality taking into consideration the sound of his or her voice, the manner of moving, the way of acting and the way he or she lives of course. Even when we see a strange person for the first time all these factors have a great impact on the impression created. When we see a successful photo of an unknown person we see only his “foreside”. A mute and flat picture will underline the bright appearance and the right moment when the photo was taken but nothing else. You even have no idea how the voice of the human depicts may sound.

John Clang is a photographer from Singapore. He lived for a long period of time in New York City working as a photographer for Hermes, Nike, Godiva. But today his photography is labeled as art photography.

The project Remembering strangers (2010) depicts disguised people from Mumbai, Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, Naples. All of them are wearing the masks. The initial idea of Clang was to depict his own impressions of strangers. Every single day we meet people which we do not know. And by the end of the day we can hardly describe the features at least one of them. The same idea concerns Clang, “By reducing their facial details to the absolute minimum, it allows them to remain as strangers in my mind, preserving a truer representation of how they have entered my life and my memories”.